Twenty-five years ago, browsing among the second-hand book-shops of Shaftesbury Avenue, my attention was arrested by a sombre volume entitled “From Grave to Gay,” by J. St. Loe Strachey.
Until then I had not heard of Mr. Strachey, and though I admit it with reluctance, I had not even heard of his famous cousin, Henry Strachey, who was private secretary to Lord Clive. But the subtitle of his book: “Concerned with Certain Subjects of Serious Interest, with the Puritans, with Literature and with the Humours of Life, Now for the First Time Collected and Arranged,” intrigued me. Those were the very subjects, I had convinced myself, with which I was concerned, for did they not give spice to life and make for surcease of its burdens? “Now for the First Time Collected and Arranged” I construed to be a belief on the part of the writer that from time to time he could substitute for the word “first” the other numerals in progressive order. Whether or not he has been able to do so, I have not determined, but every one knows that he became “editor and sole proprietor” of the London Spectator and has occupied a conspicuous place in journalism for the past quarter of a century. And now he recounts his life, or such parts of it as seem to him will permit others to understand how and why he has carried on, and he calls it “The Adventure of Living: A Subjective Autobiography,” stressing “the influences that have affected my life and for good or evil made me what I am.” He emphasises that the interesting thing about a human being is not what he is, but how he came to be what he is, which naturally includes what he does and why he does it.
Mr. Strachey came to be what he is from his heredity, aided and guided—after it had formulated itself in the organism to which, a few months later, the name John St. Loe was given—by Mrs. Salome Leaker, the family nurse. Once the reader gets her name out of the realm of risibility, he falls in love with her. A face radiant with a vivid intelligence, a nature eager and active, a fiery temper—reserved almost entirely for grown-ups—an appreciation for good literature and art, which, although she had been brought up in illiteracy, she had developed by self-education and “threw quotations from the English classics around her in a kind of hailstorm,” supplemented a genuine love of children and abounding common sense.
“There was no nonsense in her nursery as to over-exciting our minds or emotions, or that sort of thing. She was quite prepared to read us to sleep with the witches in 'Macbeth' or the death scene in 'Othello.' I can see her now, with her wrinkled, brown face, her cap with white streamers awry over her black hair beginning to turn grey. In front of her was a book, propped up against the rim of a tin candlestick shaped like a small basin. In it was a dip candle with a pair of snuffers. That was how nursery light was provided in the later 'sixties and even in the 'seventies. As she sat bent forward, declaiming the most soul-shaking things in Shakespeare between nine and ten at night, we lay in our beds with our chins on the counterpane, silent, scared, but intensely happy. We loved every word and slept quite well when the play was over.”
The pen picture of Mrs. Salome Leaker, and the photograph, are of the book's best. It is not unlikely that Mr. Strachey owes his worldly success and pleasure quite as much to his nurse as to “the famous men, and our fathers who begat us,” of whom his father, “though without a trace of anything approaching pride, was never tired of talking.”
J. ST. LOE STRACHEY
From a drawing by W. Rothenstein.
In his early childhood he was subject to occasional experiences—a sense of spiritual isolation with poignancy amounting to awe. Although he devotes several pages to them he does not succeed in describing his sensations, but in characterising them. One day while standing in a passage he suddenly had a sensation of being alone, not merely in the house, but in the world, the universe. With this came a sense of exaltation and magnification of personality so ample that it was difficult to describe. He felt then, though he was only six, that his soul had become naked. The effect on him was intensely awe-inspiring, so much so as to be disturbing in a high degree. Though not terrified, he experienced a kind of rawness and sensitiveness of soul, such as when a supersensitive mucous membrane is touched roughly by a hand or instrument. In addition to this awe and sensitiveness, was a sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living, not only of the imminence but of the ineffable greatness of the whole of which he was a part. He felt that what he was “in for” as a sentient human being was immeasurably great. It was thence that the sense of awe came, thence the extraordinary sensitiveness, thence the painful exhilaration, the spiritual sublimation. “As a human being I was not only immortal but capax imperii,—a creature worthy of a heritage so tremendous.”
Mr. Strachey defines his state as one of isolement, and further defines it as ecstasy. The latter term has probably been borrowed from current psychoanalytic terminology. It is purely a subjective term, and as this is a subjective autobiography, satisfies his needs, though it puts us only a little way on the road to understanding.